P2P is free speech... I have the freedom to express my ideas using peer-to-peer packets.
It's also a free press: You have the freedom to publish your writings and other fixed works, along with any other writings or fixed works that are either not under copyright or to which you have an appropriate license (individual or general) from the copyright holder, by using peer-to-peer packets.
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
It doesn't say treaties trump the constitution, or even are peers of it. It says that the hierarchy is Constitution -> Federal law -> Treaties -> state law.
It's even clearer in article III section 2:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;
Treaties themselves have no power internally without enabling legislation. Congress is not obligated to pass enabling legislation, to make it conform to the actual treaty language if they do pass it, or to refrain from repealing it. Courts can strike the enabling legislation (or any attempt at direct application of treaty language to the international activity of US citizens or entities) for unconstitutionality, interpret it into impotence, or set up impossible enforcement roadblocks, as easily as they do the same to federal law.
Typical... Sneak it in the back door via treaties that trump sovereign laws.
Treaties do NOT trump federal law or the Constitution.
When a treaty requires some internal law change to implement its provisions, that can only happen if congress passes such laws. Congress is not obligated to pass such laws or refrain from repealing them. Laws implementing a treaty are just as subject to being struck down as unconstitutional as any other law.
The idea that treaties are a way to effectively amend the Constitution by an easier procedure comes from a common misreading of the "supremacy clause" of the Constitution. What the clause ACTUALLY means is that the Constitution, federal law, and treaties, each trump state/county/local law when they conflict (and the laws or treaties are constitutional).
The supremacy clause from article VI:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwith-standing.
But see also article III Section 2:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;
Note how, in both, the treaties are subordinated to the Constitution and how in article III they're also clearly subordinated to federal law.
IMHO. If you're going at 1/2 C, the material will go too fast for you to able to collect enough quickly enough to fuse it.
Fusion is proportional to the pressure x density x confinement time product. Pressure and density both go up and confinement time goes down with the first power of the speed. So power goes with v*v/v, or also up with the first power. (Material collected also goes up with speed but I think that's already accounted for in density.)
If you get it to produce power at any speed it will produce MORE power if it's going faster. (Which is what you expect, since it would generate no compression and thus no power at all if at rest with respect to the interstellar gas supply.)
Relativistic time and space distortions also work in your favor at very high speeds. They both make it appear to you that you're collecting more fusible material.
Now the issue of the temperature x pressure x time product of the compressed stream is a separate matter. But AFAIK it's also unsolved for current ramscoop proposals. So I'll wave my hands on that one. B-)
The field itself compresses the hydrogen hard enough to fuse. Since the reaction is in free space, it would explode in every direction, rather than be directed so you can harness the assymetry. You'd need to have an Orion-style push plate or a solar sail to get any acceleration out of it.
Nope.
Just as you have a big magnetic (or whatever) forward-facing funnel out front to redirect the incoming hydrogen, compressing it into a narrow (fusing) stream, you have a big rear-facing funnel out back (like a giant, invisible, rocket nozzle) to redirect the expansion of the now hotter and expanding stream into a rearward-directed jet.
It's just like most other heat engines: Apply work to compress the gas, add heat, extract (more) work as the hotter gas expands with more pressure than when you compressed it. The forward thrust against your nozzle is more than the rearward thrust against your scoop, even if only by a small percentage. Thus you keep accelerating until the percentage of losses from other issues matches the percentage of gain from the fusion, just as an internal combustion engine can run as long as the mechanical power gained from each cylinderfull of fuel-air mix is greater than the friction losses, even if the power temporarily borrowed from the flywheel to compress it is many times the gain.
Now the issue of the temperature x pressure x time product of the compressed stream is a
Let's see, this also means that the various shit-brained news media should stop having him offering commentary on anything, because "disbarred lawyer" doesn't have that same ring of confidence as "crazy old coot" does.
Being a disbarred lawyer doesn't seem to have hurt Bill Clinton's speaking fees.
Don't be surprised if you see MORE of him - as he seeks to use his notoriety to pull in a few bux to replace the lost income now that he can't practice law.
WarGames was responsible for what Knight calls the Great Hacking Scare of 1983. Some examples mentioned are 'one CBS Evening News report at the time that seriously questioned whether parents should allow their children to access the outside world via their personal computers at home. A magazine article suggested that computer modems be 'locked up' just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers.
Back in those days there was more separation between TV show and movie production. And the TV executives were concerned about anything that pulled people's eyeballs away from the boob-tube (and money from their advertising rates). So there were a lot of shows that slammed the new distractions: Personal computers, networking (especially bulletin-board systems), electronic games, etc.
Similarly a few years further back, when they did the same bit on cable TV - when the separation was still more pronounced and they were worried about losing audience to paid programming such as commercial-free movie channels. I recall one cop show where the murder was committed by a cable TV operator over the negotiations and competitive bidding on a franchise to wire a city or broadcast some team's sporting events.
The conventional wisdom on Bussard Ramjets (included in the wikipedia article) is that they reach a terminal velocity due to the drag of collecting the fuel - and asymptotically approach their exhaust velocity. IMHO that's incorrect.
The bug is that the calculation assumes that they must accelerate the collected hydrogen to the velocity of the craft before fusing it, then depend on the fusion energy to re-accelerate it as exhaust.
However, as with the collected air in chemical ramjets, the momentum of the collected material does not need to be discarded. It can be fused on the fly through the ramjet, retaining its original momentum along the flight path (relative to the vessel). Thus the energy of fusion can be applied to accelerating the reaction products toward the rear. None is needed to replace the momentum allegedly lost capturing the fuel.
Now SOME of the axial momentum of the incoming fuel is traded for radial momentum to collect it. But the energy of that "lost" momentum is converted to pressure and temperature, compressing the material like any other gas. There is a drag on the scoop field from this. But when the exhaust expands again after the reaction there is a corresponding thrust against the nozzle field, reconverting the radial expansion of the reaction products to rearward velocity and recovering the "lost" momentum.
If this whole process were lossless there would be no top end to the kenetic energy the ramscoop could accumulate. With less than 100% efficiency in reapplying the compression energy to the mass (both from lost energy and lost mass) there is some drag from collection that is not recovered. (For instance: Mass lost as neutrinos is a non-trivial fraction.) So there may still be a speed limit. But it can be far higher than that calculated by assuming you "stopped" the gas when you "caught" it.
You know...a few months ago...I'd have agreed that the Dems would be a hands down winner. But, after all the [several events deleted], I don't think it is a shoo-in.
I honestly didn't get McCain much a chance, but, they way things are looking now...I think it will be VERY close for the presidency, and while I know lots of things can change, I think McCain may indeed have a chance of taking it.
The mutual-dirtying of Hillary and Obama may have dropped their support a bit. But you're missing something about McCain: He's tweaked off SO many factions of the R base SO badly that he's in much deeper doo-doo. (Starting with the gunnies back in 2000 - and they have LONG memories.)
McCain is the most left-wing of the entire crop of Republican presidential hopefuls. And (just as it took Nixon to open relations with Communist China, because they Democrats wouldn't have taken the P.R. risk alone) McCain with a Democratic congress could push through a LOT more of the left-wing agenda than either of the main Democratic presidential candidates could get even a heavily-Democratic congress to approve. So the offended factions of the Republican base actually have an incentive to let the Democrats win the Oval Office rather than let McCain have it.
Watch them stay home in droves (giving the Democratic party another boost in congress), leave the presidential slot blank, write in a "failed" candidate, or vote for a third-party.
Most likely to be Shutdown By Government?... The Republican Party.
They don't need the government to shut them down. They're doing a fine job of it themselves. The neocons who took over the party are purging all the other factions, thus downsizing it to minor party status.
In fact the Democratic party (which will BE the government next year, after they pick up the presidency and a bunch more seats in the house and senate) will prop it up, if they're smart. That will help keep the ejectees from forming a new first-tier opposition party or building up one of the minors into ready-for-prime-time status.
The Democratic Party. I wouldn't put it past them to try if McCain looks like he's on the ropes!
They're already the congress and they'll have more seats and the presidency next year. So they'll BE the government (or the necessary two branches out of three) by the time it could get around to shutting down a party.
If we change "what would YOU do" to "what to you think might be done":
A bogus root server could be coded to pay attention to the source of the query and only create illusions for targeted victims - serving normal information to everyone else.
With that capability you can perform man-in-the-middle attacks on the victim - directing his connection to your own forwarding-and-tapping-and/or-modifying servers whenever the victim is attempting to connect to an external domain and his own nameserver got the domain record from you. (And with that domain record in his nameserver cache you'll get ALL the connections he makes until he stops opening new ones long enough for the cache entry to time out. For his business partners this might be never.)
(As has been pointed out already: If you luck out and the victim comes to you for an update of the root server addresses, you've got him until there's manual intervention.)
Man in the middle beats the pants off spear phishing for corporate (or government/military) espionage. You get to inject yourself into the key exchanges of certain otherwise-secure protocols (and the conversations thereafter), getting hold of the cleartext in situations were cracking the key to read eavesdropped traffic would be impractical. You also get to modify the content on-the-fly.
The amount of mischief this enables is mind-boggling. (For starters: Stealing or reconstructing customer lists. Identifying competitors' bids in order to slightly underbid them. Obtaining other corporate secrets - with the partner with whom they're communicating taking the blame.)
Now that I look at it more closely, it seems that most of those items have already "changed the world" pretty significantly.
Listing a bunch of paradigm-shifters that are years old but still on an adoption rampup may be useful when trying to plan for the future. But it's a pretty simple algorithm for generating reports, not something particularly insightful.
Right now, diode lasers are among the most efficient (if not the most efficient) light emitters available. I'm guessing the winner, if there is one, will involve a laser or three plus diffusers/despeckling to get general lighting.
"Despeckling" means spreading the frequency of the light. The speckle comes from interference patters from the monochromatic light from the laser bouncing off surface textures. Broadband sources have speckle in each frequency, too. But the speckle from a swath of minutely different frequencies averages out to a non-speckled reflection.
So combining a laser with nanoparticles to efficiently swap the energy around between frequencies until it's smeared out into a plesant white light should do the job. B-)
Another issue with some of the earlier CFLs was the capacitor plague. This caused them to fail after a short time. That's over now.
(IMHO they should go to cold-electrode fluorescents and separate tube and electronic ballasts with an industry-standard connector. Why dump the mercury-containing tube when the electronics goes? And unlike a hot-electrode tube, with fine-wire electrodes that are subject to burnout, metal evaporation, and shock damage much like an incandescent, a cold-electrode tube can last for decades.)
I suspect NewYorkCountryLawyer has some clue about what he's talking about.
Also: According to the (current) page on it in wikipedia:
In Australian, Canadian, U.K., and U.S. legal doctrines, ex parte means a legal proceeding brought by one person in the absence of and without representation or notification of other parties. It is also used more loosely to refer to improper unilateral contacts with a court, arbitrator or represented party without notice to the other party or counsel for that party.
So it's "ex parte", not because the Does aren't present, but because the RIAA is asking the judge to rule without consulting the Does and giving them a chance to file a counterargument. If they are given a chance to file a response (even if they're not physically present - especially at the same time as the RIAA representatives which could lead to them being identified even if they should not be) then it's no longer "ex parte" according to the US usage.
Consumers choose style and functionality, and business choose features. The "open" platform will only be successful inasmuch as it is a means to those ends.
Which is why I think an open platform can displace iPhone.
It takes a major bump in functionality to displace an entrenched market player. If the iPhone weren't crippled an open phone platform would have much the same adoption dynamics as Linux vs. Microsoft/Apple desktops: A sliver and gradual growth.
But the iPhone IS massively crippled, and attempts to un-cripple it are met with update-to-brick attacks as Apple tries to protect its revenue model and that of its carrier partner(s). And it seems likely that competition could lead them to uncripple it broadly and rapidly enough to prevent a market shift.
This leaves the open platform with an opportunity to make massive functionality improvements and additions that Apple/AT&T-etc. can't or won't match. And that could driver the shift.
As Ubuntu has shown, you no longer have to be a geek to use the advanced feature set of an open platform. The same could be true of an open phone platform: Out of the box already far more functional than iPhone (or whatever), download new whiz-bangs with a few touches as it is developed and you decide you want it - or get your retailer's service department to do it for you for a very nominal fee (or the techie in the next cube or your internet-savvy kid to do it for nothing).
1) Find out what they want. (They will ask for bells and whistles and not tell you core process basics.)
2) Figure out what they actually need. (Research their actual process and design improvements.)
3) Try to convince them to want what they actually need and change the spec go with that.
4) After step 3), give them what they now want, whether it's what they need or not. (Provided it's legal and ethical.)
And of course:
5) Profit!
They are the bosses / customers. They decide what to spend money on. You are the hireling. You agree to do what they want in trade for the fee they pay. After step 3) your moral and ethical obligations are discharged - and if your suggestions are good you've proved your worth. If they're smart they go with what you suggested - or know something about their business that you didn't and reject your suggestion on that basis. But if they decide to do something you think is stupid once they've been informed, it's their business, so it's their call.
Slashdot Mirror
P2P is free speech ... I have the freedom to express my ideas using peer-to-peer packets.
It's also a free press: You have the freedom to publish your writings and other fixed works, along with any other writings or fixed works that are either not under copyright or to which you have an appropriate license (individual or general) from the copyright holder, by using peer-to-peer packets.
It's clearer if you quote the whole thing:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
It doesn't say treaties trump the constitution, or even are peers of it. It says that the hierarchy is Constitution -> Federal law -> Treaties -> state law.
It's even clearer in article III section 2:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;
Treaties themselves have no power internally without enabling legislation. Congress is not obligated to pass enabling legislation, to make it conform to the actual treaty language if they do pass it, or to refrain from repealing it. Courts can strike the enabling legislation (or any attempt at direct application of treaty language to the international activity of US citizens or entities) for unconstitutionality, interpret it into impotence, or set up impossible enforcement roadblocks, as easily as they do the same to federal law.
Typical ... Sneak it in the back door via treaties that trump sovereign laws.
Treaties do NOT trump federal law or the Constitution.
When a treaty requires some internal law change to implement its provisions, that can only happen if congress passes such laws. Congress is not obligated to pass such laws or refrain from repealing them. Laws implementing a treaty are just as subject to being struck down as unconstitutional as any other law.
The idea that treaties are a way to effectively amend the Constitution by an easier procedure comes from a common misreading of the "supremacy clause" of the Constitution. What the clause ACTUALLY means is that the Constitution, federal law, and treaties, each trump state/county/local law when they conflict (and the laws or treaties are constitutional).
The supremacy clause from article VI:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwith-standing.
But see also article III Section 2:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;
Note how, in both, the treaties are subordinated to the Constitution and how in article III they're also clearly subordinated to federal law.
IMHO. If you're going at 1/2 C, the material will go too fast for you to able to collect enough quickly enough to fuse it.
Fusion is proportional to the pressure x density x confinement time product. Pressure and density both go up and confinement time goes down with the first power of the speed. So power goes with v*v/v, or also up with the first power. (Material collected also goes up with speed but I think that's already accounted for in density.)
If you get it to produce power at any speed it will produce MORE power if it's going faster. (Which is what you expect, since it would generate no compression and thus no power at all if at rest with respect to the interstellar gas supply.)
Relativistic time and space distortions also work in your favor at very high speeds. They both make it appear to you that you're collecting more fusible material.
(oops. Continuing...)
Now the issue of the temperature x pressure x time product of the compressed stream is a separate matter. But AFAIK it's also unsolved for current ramscoop proposals. So I'll wave my hands on that one. B-)
The field itself compresses the hydrogen hard enough to fuse. Since the reaction is in free space, it would explode in every direction, rather than be directed so you can harness the assymetry. You'd need to have an Orion-style push plate or a solar sail to get any acceleration out of it.
Nope.
Just as you have a big magnetic (or whatever) forward-facing funnel out front to redirect the incoming hydrogen, compressing it into a narrow (fusing) stream, you have a big rear-facing funnel out back (like a giant, invisible, rocket nozzle) to redirect the expansion of the now hotter and expanding stream into a rearward-directed jet.
It's just like most other heat engines: Apply work to compress the gas, add heat, extract (more) work as the hotter gas expands with more pressure than when you compressed it. The forward thrust against your nozzle is more than the rearward thrust against your scoop, even if only by a small percentage. Thus you keep accelerating until the percentage of losses from other issues matches the percentage of gain from the fusion, just as an internal combustion engine can run as long as the mechanical power gained from each cylinderfull of fuel-air mix is greater than the friction losses, even if the power temporarily borrowed from the flywheel to compress it is many times the gain.
Now the issue of the temperature x pressure x time product of the compressed stream is a
Let's see, this also means that the various shit-brained news media should stop having him offering commentary on anything, because "disbarred lawyer" doesn't have that same ring of confidence as "crazy old coot" does.
Being a disbarred lawyer doesn't seem to have hurt Bill Clinton's speaking fees.
Don't be surprised if you see MORE of him - as he seeks to use his notoriety to pull in a few bux to replace the lost income now that he can't practice law.
WarGames was responsible for what Knight calls the Great Hacking Scare of 1983. Some examples mentioned are 'one CBS Evening News report at the time that seriously questioned whether parents should allow their children to access the outside world via their personal computers at home. A magazine article suggested that computer modems be 'locked up' just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers.
Back in those days there was more separation between TV show and movie production. And the TV executives were concerned about anything that pulled people's eyeballs away from the boob-tube (and money from their advertising rates). So there were a lot of shows that slammed the new distractions: Personal computers, networking (especially bulletin-board systems), electronic games, etc.
Similarly a few years further back, when they did the same bit on cable TV - when the separation was still more pronounced and they were worried about losing audience to paid programming such as commercial-free movie channels. I recall one cop show where the murder was committed by a cable TV operator over the negotiations and competitive bidding on a franchise to wire a city or broadcast some team's sporting events.
A somewhat off-topic digression:
The conventional wisdom on Bussard Ramjets (included in the wikipedia article) is that they reach a terminal velocity due to the drag of collecting the fuel - and asymptotically approach their exhaust velocity. IMHO that's incorrect.
The bug is that the calculation assumes that they must accelerate the collected hydrogen to the velocity of the craft before fusing it, then depend on the fusion energy to re-accelerate it as exhaust.
However, as with the collected air in chemical ramjets, the momentum of the collected material does not need to be discarded. It can be fused on the fly through the ramjet, retaining its original momentum along the flight path (relative to the vessel). Thus the energy of fusion can be applied to accelerating the reaction products toward the rear. None is needed to replace the momentum allegedly lost capturing the fuel.
Now SOME of the axial momentum of the incoming fuel is traded for radial momentum to collect it. But the energy of that "lost" momentum is converted to pressure and temperature, compressing the material like any other gas. There is a drag on the scoop field from this. But when the exhaust expands again after the reaction there is a corresponding thrust against the nozzle field, reconverting the radial expansion of the reaction products to rearward velocity and recovering the "lost" momentum.
If this whole process were lossless there would be no top end to the kenetic energy the ramscoop could accumulate. With less than 100% efficiency in reapplying the compression energy to the mass (both from lost energy and lost mass) there is some drag from collection that is not recovered. (For instance: Mass lost as neutrinos is a non-trivial fraction.) So there may still be a speed limit. But it can be far higher than that calculated by assuming you "stopped" the gas when you "caught" it.
You know...a few months ago...I'd have agreed that the Dems would be a hands down winner. But, after all the [several events deleted], I don't think it is a shoo-in.
I honestly didn't get McCain much a chance, but, they way things are looking now...I think it will be VERY close for the presidency, and while I know lots of things can change, I think McCain may indeed have a chance of taking it.
The mutual-dirtying of Hillary and Obama may have dropped their support a bit. But you're missing something about McCain: He's tweaked off SO many factions of the R base SO badly that he's in much deeper doo-doo. (Starting with the gunnies back in 2000 - and they have LONG memories.)
McCain is the most left-wing of the entire crop of Republican presidential hopefuls. And (just as it took Nixon to open relations with Communist China, because they Democrats wouldn't have taken the P.R. risk alone) McCain with a Democratic congress could push through a LOT more of the left-wing agenda than either of the main Democratic presidential candidates could get even a heavily-Democratic congress to approve. So the offended factions of the Republican base actually have an incentive to let the Democrats win the Oval Office rather than let McCain have it.
Watch them stay home in droves (giving the Democratic party another boost in congress), leave the presidential slot blank, write in a "failed" candidate, or vote for a third-party.
Most likely to be Shutdown By Government? ... The Republican Party.
They don't need the government to shut them down. They're doing a fine job of it themselves. The neocons who took over the party are purging all the other factions, thus downsizing it to minor party status.
In fact the Democratic party (which will BE the government next year, after they pick up the presidency and a bunch more seats in the house and senate) will prop it up, if they're smart. That will help keep the ejectees from forming a new first-tier opposition party or building up one of the minors into ready-for-prime-time status.
The Democratic Party. I wouldn't put it past them to try if McCain looks like he's on the ropes!
They're already the congress and they'll have more seats and the presidency next year. So they'll BE the government (or the necessary two branches out of three) by the time it could get around to shutting down a party.
B-)
If we change "what would YOU do" to "what to you think might be done":
A bogus root server could be coded to pay attention to the source of the query and only create illusions for targeted victims - serving normal information to everyone else.
With that capability you can perform man-in-the-middle attacks on the victim - directing his connection to your own forwarding-and-tapping-and/or-modifying servers whenever the victim is attempting to connect to an external domain and his own nameserver got the domain record from you. (And with that domain record in his nameserver cache you'll get ALL the connections he makes until he stops opening new ones long enough for the cache entry to time out. For his business partners this might be never.)
(As has been pointed out already: If you luck out and the victim comes to you for an update of the root server addresses, you've got him until there's manual intervention.)
Man in the middle beats the pants off spear phishing for corporate (or government/military) espionage. You get to inject yourself into the key exchanges of certain otherwise-secure protocols (and the conversations thereafter), getting hold of the cleartext in situations were cracking the key to read eavesdropped traffic would be impractical. You also get to modify the content on-the-fly.
The amount of mischief this enables is mind-boggling. (For starters: Stealing or reconstructing customer lists. Identifying competitors' bids in order to slightly underbid them. Obtaining other corporate secrets - with the partner with whom they're communicating taking the blame.)
Now that I look at it more closely, it seems that most of those items have already "changed the world" pretty significantly.
Listing a bunch of paradigm-shifters that are years old but still on an adoption rampup may be useful when trying to plan for the future. But it's a pretty simple algorithm for generating reports, not something particularly insightful.
Multi-core chips WILL change the world over the NEXT four years? They ALREADY HAVE.
They've been providing massive crunch in internet routers for years.
Without a Linux version, it's obviously the work of Satan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATAN">SATAN ran just fine on Linux. But it didn't sniff for forged RST packets.
Right now, diode lasers are among the most efficient (if not the most efficient) light emitters available. I'm guessing the winner, if there is one, will involve a laser or three plus diffusers/despeckling to get general lighting.
"Despeckling" means spreading the frequency of the light. The speckle comes from interference patters from the monochromatic light from the laser bouncing off surface textures. Broadband sources have speckle in each frequency, too. But the speckle from a swath of minutely different frequencies averages out to a non-speckled reflection.
So combining a laser with nanoparticles to efficiently swap the energy around between frequencies until it's smeared out into a plesant white light should do the job. B-)
Another issue with some of the earlier CFLs was the capacitor plague. This caused them to fail after a short time. That's over now.
(IMHO they should go to cold-electrode fluorescents and separate tube and electronic ballasts with an industry-standard connector. Why dump the mercury-containing tube when the electronics goes? And unlike a hot-electrode tube, with fine-wire electrodes that are subject to burnout, metal evaporation, and shock damage much like an incandescent, a cold-electrode tube can last for decades.)
I suspect NewYorkCountryLawyer has some clue about what he's talking about.
Also: According to the (current) page on it in wikipedia:
In Australian, Canadian, U.K., and U.S. legal doctrines, ex parte means a legal proceeding brought by one person in the absence of and without representation or notification of other parties. It is also used more loosely to refer to improper unilateral contacts with a court, arbitrator or represented party without notice to the other party or counsel for that party.
So it's "ex parte", not because the Does aren't present, but because the RIAA is asking the judge to rule without consulting the Does and giving them a chance to file a counterargument. If they are given a chance to file a response (even if they're not physically present - especially at the same time as the RIAA representatives which could lead to them being identified even if they should not be) then it's no longer "ex parte" according to the US usage.
The wayback machine doesn't have it? You mean this is fresh news!?!?
Sometimes the wayback machine will have fresh stuff.
And sometimes, by the time Slashdot gets around to linking stuff, it's not all that fresh anymore. B-)
Can't RTFA. They're slashdotted.
(Mirrordot seems to have died and the wayback machine doesn't have it.)
Consumers choose style and functionality, and business choose features. The "open" platform will only be successful inasmuch as it is a means to those ends.
Which is why I think an open platform can displace iPhone.
It takes a major bump in functionality to displace an entrenched market player. If the iPhone weren't crippled an open phone platform would have much the same adoption dynamics as Linux vs. Microsoft/Apple desktops: A sliver and gradual growth.
But the iPhone IS massively crippled, and attempts to un-cripple it are met with update-to-brick attacks as Apple tries to protect its revenue model and that of its carrier partner(s). And it seems likely that competition could lead them to uncripple it broadly and rapidly enough to prevent a market shift.
This leaves the open platform with an opportunity to make massive functionality improvements and additions that Apple/AT&T-etc. can't or won't match. And that could driver the shift.
As Ubuntu has shown, you no longer have to be a geek to use the advanced feature set of an open platform. The same could be true of an open phone platform: Out of the box already far more functional than iPhone (or whatever), download new whiz-bangs with a few touches as it is developed and you decide you want it - or get your retailer's service department to do it for you for a very nominal fee (or the techie in the next cube or your internet-savvy kid to do it for nothing).
Given the ways Apple has crippled the iPhone it seems to me that a well designed open platform has the potential to blow them out of the water.
So how is Open Moko coming along? And are there other candidates that appear to be beyond the vapor stage?
The consulting algorithm:
1) Find out what they want. (They will ask for bells and whistles and not tell you core process basics.)
2) Figure out what they actually need. (Research their actual process and design improvements.)
3) Try to convince them to want what they actually need and change the spec go with that.
4) After step 3), give them what they now want, whether it's what they need or not. (Provided it's legal and ethical.)
And of course:
5) Profit!
They are the bosses / customers. They decide what to spend money on. You are the hireling. You agree to do what they want in trade for the fee they pay. After step 3) your moral and ethical obligations are discharged - and if your suggestions are good you've proved your worth. If they're smart they go with what you suggested - or know something about their business that you didn't and reject your suggestion on that basis. But if they decide to do something you think is stupid once they've been informed, it's their business, so it's their call.